MUMBAI: Crest Animation Studios has completed rendering of India’s first 3D stereoscopic animation feature film Alpha and Omega, which was released on 17 September.

This was completed in record time using ‘eka’ supercomputer at Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons. This is the first time an Indian studio has taken on the top global animation studios on their own turf by releasing the movie in screens across US and Europe, and marks yet another milestone in Indian animation industry.

With Alpha & Omega, Crest Animation Studios becomes the first studio in India to have co-produced a full length 3D stereoscopic animated feature film for the global CGI market.

In conjunction to its own infrastructure, Crest used the high-performance computing infrastructure at CRL to accelerate its rendering schedule by about five months. CRL’s supercomputer ‘eka’, which was used in this project, is one of the world’s fastest and most versatile supercomputers. It can perform more than 133 Trillion sustained calculations per second. ‘eka’  made it possible for Crest to reduce their render times per frame by about 50% and increase throughput by approximately 500% without proportional cost implications.

Crest Animation Studios CEO A K Madhavan said, ““Rendering of animation movie is a very compute intensive process. It also tends to be very time consuming and costly. With our own infrastructure, it looked tough to manage our release schedule for September 2010. With CRL’s infrastructure it was possible for us to plan for an early release during Cannes Film Festival in May 2010. Their strong expertise in delivering on-demand high performance computing (HPC) and their dedicated support services proved to be a cost-effective alternative to investing in additional infrastructure.”

CRL chairman S Ramadorai added, “CRL’s High Performance Cloud provides one of the fastest rendering infrastructures available globally. It provides a highly cost effective solution backed by a cloud based business model where the customer only pays for what he uses. CRL has been able to quickly ramp up and down the infrastructure to best suit a customer’s immediate needs. With CRL, customers get to focus only on the creative part of the production process – that which they do best – and leave computing worries to us.”